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foldryesterday at 4:23 PM2 repliesview on HN

The usual meaning of English. Say, roughly the criteria that would make someone eligible to play for the England football team. Skin color has nothing to do with it, and I can assure you that very few English people either know or care whether they have any ‘Celtic’ ancestry.

No-one questions the Englishness of white men born in England to two non-English parents. People raising the absurd non-issue of Rishi Sunak’s Englishness are just concealing their rather obvious prejudices with a lot of bafflegab about ‘English ethnicity’ (a concept which not even they can really take at all seriously, if they at least have some acquaintance with English history).


Replies

RansomStarkyesterday at 9:29 PM

Sports teams aren't a particularly good criteria, I could be Scottish or Welsh and play for England, it's one of those idiocracies of living in a country that pretends to be 4.

Denying the existence of an ethic group is extremely racist, and is often considered a precursor to other much more serious issues.

If you have any acquaintance with English history you would be well aware that there are native ethnic groups that have been in the UK since approximately the end of the younger dryas around 11,000 years ago.

The last major migration was the anglo-saxons around 1500 years ago.

These groups still exist and the majority of the UK population can still trace their origin back to one of these groups.

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9JollyOtteryesterday at 6:56 PM

There are Ethnic groups in England that have been present for several thousand years. Some people clearly mean this and can't articulate it better.

Rushi Sunak ancestry is obviously Indian. I don't really care about his ethnicity (he another politician in a suit to me), but I can understand what people mean when they say he isn't English without automatically assuming they are Racist.